Castle Freak (1995)

Stuart Gordon doesn't get his due. Sure, the Re-Animator is a classic of sorts, but what about Gordon the director? Gordon the horror auteur who is always trying for something really new? With each horror film, he departs more from formula and invents his own way, a new way, of delving into the macabre and frightening the audience. He's not as intellectual as Romero, but he's formally a more innovative director.

With Castle Freak, Gordon reveals a particularly mature approach to horror that sort of works and sort of doesn't. It is has the salacious and scandalous seriousness of the more sordid works of gothic literature. Also like gothic novels, the film is predicated on the theme of family, particularly dark family secrets. It also takes place in a castle. Yes, indeed, Castle Freak is a salacious and sensationalist piece of gothic storytelling.

The plot concerns a husband (Jeffrey Combs), his wife (Barbara Crampton), and his blind daughter coming to the castle he has just inherited from his aunt, the duchess. They get more than they bargained for when the chronically abused, mutilated son in the cellar breaks free and wants sex, lots of sex--like Shakespeare's Caliban. In the meanwhile, Combs and Crampton are constantly in emotional conflict because his drunk driving took the life of their son.

The term 'mean-spirited' is often used as a dismissive term. Castle Freak is mature--there's no funny stuff, the themes are serious, the emotions of the characters are given room to be expressed and explored in earnest--but as I noted, also salacious. The combination gives the film a mean-spirited edge. One particular scene gives a whole new meaning to the expression 'eating a girl out.' It is unpleasant, but not unnecessary.

The film deals very much with the theme of sexual frustration. Just as Combs is forever denied by his wife, the freak from the cellar lacks a sexual organ to do anything with the women he captures. Where Combs takes out his frustration in more peaceful ways--or by going to prostitutes--the monster becomes violent.

Castle Freak is actually a very good, thoughtful movie. There are a few stupid moments. For instance, one wonders how a mutilated man kept in a cellar for decades is suddenly strong enough to break down doors and overpower a rather hefty police officer. One also must endure seeing the freak's ballsack a lot, because it's naked during the entire latter half of the film--I suppose that's a touch of realism I should be applauding, but I could have done without monster balls in my face. However, all that aside, one is left really with a mature approach to horror that has largely been neglected due to the general immaturity of the times. Had it been more playful like The Reanimator, it might have satisfied our juvenile tastes better. As it stands, it may be appreciated in times to come. But I myself found it a bit mean-spirited and the drama between Crampton and Combs annoying.

Dagon (2001) - 3.5/4

There are three collective reasons I can imagine for someone not liking Stuart Gordon's Dagon:

1. Many H.P. Lovecraft fans are obsessive and pedantic about the Master's work, probably due to the esoteric feel one gets from knowing Lovecraft well when so few do.

2. Many think a film should be literally and/or thematically faithful to the literary work(s) it adapts.

3. Many Lovecraft fans thus have a very limited view of what a Lovecraftian film ought to be and reject as a failure any Lovecraft-based film that does not fit the preconceived mould.

And it's mostly going to be Lovecraft fans watching Dagon, an adaptation of The Shadow Over Innsmouth (even though it did not contain Dagon, who is from Lovecraft's story "Dagon"). That alone gets stuck in the craw of the encyclopedic little Lovecraft-buff, and probably hinders his or her enjoyment from the get-go.

I, as it happens, have read very little of Lovecraft and what I have read was read ten years ago. I also happen to think a film has no duty to the work(s) it uses as source material, so even if I had read every word of Lovecraft I'd not judge the film on that basis. Therefore, I have little sympathy for the criteria of judgment the pedantic Lovecraftian indulges in.

With the film itself, we get, from within the first fifteen minutes, almost constant suspenseful action with an hour-long chase punctuated only by a flashback, all set in an exotic, spooky, highly atmospheric location that is perpetually dark and rainy, filled with well-designed monsters that hunt the hero at every step. This is how Resident Evil and Silent Hill should have been done; it reminds one of those games in feeling.

The plot concerns a young man--who has nightmares of a beautiful, black-haired mermaid--his girlfriend, and their two friends finding themselves at the mercy of a mysterious storm. The young man finds himself separated from his three companions in a town populated by fishy (pun intended) inhabitants: human-fish hybrids.

Gradually it is revealed that the inhabitants are worshipers of a being called Dagon. Dagon began by granting the villagers fish and gold from the sea, but soon claimed their souls as they began to mutate into human-hating fish-beasts.

In Dagon Gordon creates a location so evocative and so intensely creepy, it is as if he transposed it directly from his imagination. The labyrinthine Old World town is engulfed in dark, besieged by rain, and filled with fish-mutants with a hunger for our hero. They are everywhere and one never knows where one will come from or what the next one will appear like.

Gordon also creates one of the most suspenseful chases in horror cinema. The entire town pursues our hero as he hides in delapidated buildings, old churches, slimy alleyways. The pursuit continues for nearly the duration of the film. The only period of rest Gordon allows the audience is during an explanatory flashback by an old drunk (Francisco Rabal, no less!).

Needless to say, I found this film to be very impressive. I don't know or care how faithful it is to Lovecraft. Gordon has distilled horror, terror, and atmosphere into an intense, parsimonious 98 minutes of brilliant horror cinema. The images revolt, the monsters terrify, and the dark town overwhelms with atmosphere. I've never seen any other film like it. In fact, the only comparison is what one sees in the imagination while reading some old issues of Weird Tales.